IBM's Blue Cloud is Web Computing By Another Name
IBM wants some of that Web 2.0 mojo. That is what is behind its announcement today of Blue Cloud, a set of "cloud computing" offerings that will be available to its corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008.
Context & Ripple Effects
IBM's Blue Cloud announcement lands two days after the company closed its $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence vendor Cognos, a deal framed as evidence that midsize software firms can no longer survive independently — Big Blue is buying capability while simultaneously renting out its own. The move also follows IBM's October joint initiative with Google to teach massively parallel programming to students and researchers, which seeded exactly the workload style a cloud offering needs.
TechCrunch's read is skeptical: Blue Cloud is 'web computing by another name,' a bid for Web 2.0 momentum by an incumbent whose core business is selling boxes and software licenses into corporate data centers. The New York Times ran the same story the same day as I.B.M. to push cloud computing using data from afar, signaling how far the term had traveled beyond the web-native crowd.
First-order effects
- Corporate customers get a Q1 2008 delivery date for cloud offerings from their incumbent supplier, letting them experiment with rented remote compute without leaving IBM's account relationship.
- IBM now competes directly on messaging with the web-native companies that defined the category, having already partnered with Google on parallel-programming education rather than fighting it outright.
Second-order effects
- The Google-IBM academic initiative functions as a demand pipeline: students trained on massively parallel programming graduate into enterprises that IBM can then sell Blue Cloud capacity to.
- Blue Cloud gives IBM's consulting and hardware arms a new attach point — the same week it launched 'green' certificates for measuring data-center energy efficiency, tying cloud consolidation pitches to power-cost savings it can itself certify.
Third-order effects
- If incumbents can relabel utility-style data-center computing as 'cloud,' the term risks meaning two things at once — elastic self-service capacity versus rented enterprise infrastructure — forcing buyers to distinguish marketing from architecture.
- The pattern points toward large IT vendors absorbing independent software categories (as with Cognos) and converting owned data centers into metered services, shifting enterprise IT procurement from license purchases to consumption contracts.
The trend: Legacy enterprise vendors are repackaging their data-center scale under the 'cloud' banner to meet web-native entrants on their own terminology, turning utility computing into an incumbent product line.